Lost in a Good Book

14. The Gravitube

Pickwick insisted on sitting on her egg all the way to Mum’s house and plocked nervously whenever I went over twenty miles per hour. I made her a nest in the airing cupboard and left her fussing over her egg while the other dodos strained at the window, trying to figure out what was going on. I rang Bowden while Mum fixed me a sandwich.

‘Are you okay?’ he enquired. ‘Your phone’s been off the hook!’

‘I’m okay, Bowd. What’s happening at the office?’

‘The news is out.’

‘About Landen?’

‘About Cardenio. Someone blabbed to the press. Vole Towers is besieged by news channels as we speak. Lord Volescamper has been yelling at Victor about one of us talking.’

‘Wasn’t me.’

‘Nor me. Volescamper has turned down fifty million quid for it already—every impresario on the planet wants to buy the rights for first performance. And get this—you’ve been cleared by SO-1 of any wrongdoing. They thought that since Kaylieu was shot by SO-14 marksmen yesterday morning then you might have been right after all.’

‘Big of them. Does this mean my leave is over?’

‘Victor wants to see you as soon as possible.’

‘Tell him I’m ill, would you? I have to go to Osaka.’

‘Why?’

‘Best not to know. I’ll call you.’

I replaced the receiver and Mum gave me some cheese on toast and a cup of tea. She sat down at the other side of the table and flicked through a well-thumbed copy of last month’s Femole—the one with me in it.

‘Any news from Mycroft and Polly, Mum?’

‘I got a card from London saying they were fit and well,’ she replied, ‘but they said they needed a jar of piccalilli and a torque wrench. I left them in Mycroft’s study and they’d vanished by the afternoon.’

‘Mum?’

‘Yes?’

‘How often do you see Dad?’

She smiled. ‘Most mornings. He drops by to say hello. Sometimes I even make him a packed lunch—’

She was interrupted by a roar that sounded like a thousand tubas in unison. The sound reverberated through the house and set the teacups in the corner cupboard rattling.

‘Oh, Lordy!’ she exclaimed. ‘Not mammoths again!’ And she was out of the door in a flash.

And a mammoth it was, in name and stature. Shaggy and as big as a tank, it had walked through the garden wall and was now sniffing suspiciously at the wisteria.

‘Get away from there!’ yelled my mother, searching around for a weapon of some sort. Wisely, the dodos had all run away and hidden behind the potting shed. Rejecting the wisteria, the mammoth delicately pulled up the vegetables in the vegetable plot one by one, stuffed them into its mouth and munched slowly and deliberately. My mother was almost apoplectic.

‘Second time this has happened!’ she yelled defiantly. ‘Get off my hydrangeas, you… you… thing!’ The mammoth ignored her, emptied the entire contents of the ornamental pond in one go and clumsily trampled the garden furniture to matchwood.

‘A weapon,’ announced my mother, ‘I need a weapon. I’ve sweated blood over this garden and no reactivated herbivore is going to have it for dinner!’

She disappeared into the shed and reappeared a moment later brandishing a yard broom. But the mammoth had little to fear, even from my mother. It did, after all, weigh almost five tons. It was used to doing exactly what it pleased. The only good news about the invasion was that it wasn’t the whole herd.

‘Giddout!’ yelled my mother, raising the broom to whack the mammoth on its hindquarters.

‘Hold it right there!’ said a loud voice. We turned. A SpecOps officer had hopped over the wall and was running towards us.

‘Agent Durrell, SO-13,’ he announced breathlessly, showing my mother his ID. ‘Spank the mammoth and you’re under arrest.’

My mother’s fury switched to the SpecOps agent.

‘So he eats my garden and I do nothing?’

‘Her name is Buttercup,’ corrected Durrell. ‘The rest of the herd went to the west of Swindon as planned but Buttercup here is a bit of a dreamer. And yes, you do nothing. Mammoths are a protected species.’

‘Well!’ said my mother indignantly. ‘If you did your job properly then ordinary law-abiding citizens like me would still have gardens!’

We looked around at the garden, which looked as though it had been the target of an artillery bombardment. Buttercup, her voluminous tum now full of Mum’s vegetable patch, stepped over the wall and scratched herself against an iron streetlamp, snapping it like a twig. The lamp standard dropped heavily on the roof of a car and popped the windscreen. Buttercup let out another almighty trumpeting, which set off a few car alarms, and in the distance there was an answer. She stopped, listened for a bit and then happily lumbered off down the road.

‘I’ve got to go!’ said Durrell, handing Mum a card ‘Compensation can be claimed if you call this number. You might like to ask for our free leaflet: “How to make your garden unpalatable to Proboscidea”. Good morning!’

He tipped his hat and jumped over the wall to where his partner had pulled up in an SO-13 Land Rover. Buttercup gave out another call and the Land Rover screeched off, leaving my mother and me staring at her wrecked garden. The dodos, sensing the danger had passed, crept out from behind the potting shed and plock-plocked quietly to themselves as they pecked and scratched at the scoured earth.

‘Perhaps it’s time for a Japanese garden,’ sighed my mother, throwing down the broom handle. ‘Reverse engineering! Where will it all end? They say there’s a Diatryma living wild in the New Forest?’

‘Urban legend,’ I assured her as she started to tidy up the garden. I looked at my watch. I would have to run if I was to get to Osaka that evening.

I took the train to the busy Saknussum International Gravitube Terminus, located just to the west of London. I made my way into the departures terminal and studied the board. The next DeepDrop to Sydney would be in an hour. I bought a ticket, hurried to the check-in and spent ten minutes listening to a litany of pointless anti-terrorist questions.

‘I don’t have a bag,’ I explained The woman looked at me oddly so I added. ‘Well, I did but you lost it the last time I travelled. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a bag returned to me after tubing.’

She thought about this for a moment and then said:

‘If you had a bag and if you had packed it yourself, and if you had not left it unattended, might it contain any of the following?’

She showed me a list of prohibited items and I shook my head.

‘Would you like an in-drop meal?’

‘What are my choices?’

‘Yes or no.’

‘No.’

She looked at the next question on her sheet.

‘Who would you prefer to sit next to?’

‘A nun or a knitting granny, if that’s possible.’

‘Hmm,’ mused the check-in girl, studying the passenger manifest carefully. ‘All the nuns, grannies and intelligent non-amorous males are taken. It’s technobore, lawyer, self-pitying drunk or copiously vomiting baby, I’m afraid.’

‘Technobore and lawyer, then.’

She marked me down on the seating plan and then announced:

‘There will be a slight delay in receiving the excuse for the lateness of the DeepDrop to Sydney, Miss Next. The reason for the delay in the excuse has yet to be established.’

Another check-in girl whispered something in her ear.

‘I’ve just been informed that the reason for the excuse for the delay has been delayed itself. As soon as we find out why the reason for the excuse has been delayed we will tell you—in line with government guidelines. If you are at all unhappy with the speed with which the excuse has been delivered, you might be eligible for a one per cent refund. Have a nice drop.’

I was handed my boarding card and told to go to the gate when the drop was announced. I thanked her, bought some coffee and biscuits and sat down to wait. The Gravitube seemed to be plagued with delays. There were a lot of travellers sitting around looking bored as they waited for their trip. In theory every drop took under an hour irrespective of destination; but even if they developed a twenty-minute accelerated DeepDrop to the other side of the planet, you’d still spend four hours at either end waiting for baggage or customs or something.

The PA barked into life.

‘Attention, please. Passengers for the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney will be glad to know that the delay was due to too many excuses being created by the Gravitube’s Excuse Manufacturing Facility. Consequently we are happy to announce that since the excess excuses have now been used, the 11.04 DeepDrop to Sydney is ready for boarding at Gate Six.’

I finished my coffee and made my way with the throng to where the shuttle was waiting to receive us. I had ridden on the Gravitube several times before, but never the DeepDrop. My recent tour of the world had all been Overmantles, which is more like a train. I carried on through passport control, boarded the shuttle and was shown to my seat by a stewardess whose fixed smile reminded me of a synchronised swimmer. I sat next to a man with a shock of untidy black hair who was reading a copy of Astounding Tales.

‘Hello,’ he said in a subdued monotone. ‘Ever DeepDropped before?’

‘Never,’ I replied.

‘Better than any rollercoaster,’ he announced with finality, and returned to his magazine.

I strapped myself in as a tall man in a large-check suit sat down next to me. He was about forty, had a luxunant red moustache and wore a carnation in his buttonhole.

‘Good morning, Miss Next!’ he said in a friendly voice as he proffered his hand. ‘Allow me to introduce myself—Akrid Snell.’

I stared at him in surprise and he laughed.

‘We needed some time to talk and I’ve never been on one of these before. How does it work?’

‘The Gravitube? It’s a tunnel running through the centre of the earth. We freefall all the way to Sydney. But… but… how on earth did you find me?’

‘Jurisfiction has eyes and ears everywhere, Miss Next.’

‘Plain English, Snell—or I could turn out to be the most difficult client you’ve ever had.’

Snell looked at me with interest for a few moments as a stewardess gave a monotonous safety announcement, culminating with the warning that there were no toilet facilities until gravity returned to 40 per cent.

‘You work in SpecOps, don’t you?’ asked Snell as soon as we were comfortable and all loose possessions had been placed in zippered bags.

I nodded.

‘Jurisfiction is the service we run inside novels to maintain the integrity of popular fiction. The printed word might look solid to you, but where I come from movable type has a much deeper meaning.’

‘The ending of Jane Eyre,’ I murmured, suddenly realising what all the fuss was about. ‘I changed it, didn’t I?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ agreed Snell, ‘but don’t admit that to anyone but me. It was the biggest Fiction Infraction to a major work since someone futzed so badly with Thackeray’s Giant Despair we had to delete it completely.’

‘Drop is D minus two minutes,’ said the announcer. ‘Would all passengers please take their seats, check their straps and make sure all infants are secured.’

‘So what’s happening now?’ asked Snell.

‘Do you really not know anything about the Gravitube?’

Snell looked around and lowered his voice.

‘All of your world is a bit strange to me, Next. I come from a land of trench coats and deep shadows, complex plot lines, frightened witnesses, underground bosses, gangsters’ molls, seedy bars and startling six-page-from-the-end dénouements.’

I must have looked confused for he lowered his voice farther and hissed:

‘I’m fictional, Miss Next. Co-lead in the Perkins & Snell series of crime books. I expect you’ve read me?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I admitted.

‘Limited print run.’ Snell sighed. ‘But we had a good review in Crime Books Digest. I was described as “a well-rounded and amusing character… with quite a few memorable lines”. The Mole placed us on their Read of the Week list but The Toad were less enthusiastic—but listen, who takes any notice of the critics?’

‘You’re fictional? I said at last.

‘Keep it to yourself, though, won’t you?’ he urged. ‘Now, about the Gravitube?’

‘Well,’ I replied, gathering my thoughts, ‘in a few minutes the shuttle will have entered the airlock and depressurisation will commence—’

‘Depressurisation? Why?’

‘For a frictionless drop. No air resistance—and we are kept from touching the sides by a powerful magnetic field. We then simply freefall the eight thousand miles to Sydney.’

‘So all cities have a DeepDrop to every other city, then?’

‘Only London and New York connecting to Sydney and Tokyo. If you wanted to get from Buenos Aires to Auckland you’d first take the Overmantle to Miami, then to New York, DeepDrop to Tokyo and finally another Overmantle to Auckland.’

‘How fast does it go?’ asked Snell, slightly nervously.

‘Peaks at fourteen thousand miles per hour,’ said my neighbour from behind his magazine, ‘give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the centre of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the centre our velocity will decrease until we reach Sydney, when our velocity will have decreased to zero.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Of course!’ I assured him.

‘What if there’s another shuttle coming the other way?’

‘There can’t be,’ I assured him. ‘There’s only one shuttle per tube.’

‘What you say is true,’ said my boring neighbour. ‘The only thing we have to worry about is a failure of the magnetic containment system that keeps the ceramic tube and us from melting in the liquid core of the earth.’

‘Don’t listen to this, Snell.’

‘Is that likely?’ he asked.

‘Never happened before,’ replied the man sombrely. ‘But then if it had, they wouldn’t tell us about it, now, would they?’

Snell thought about this for a few moments.

‘Drop is D minus ten seconds,’ said the announcer.

The cabin went quiet and everyone tensed, subconsciously counting down. The drop, when it came, was a bit like going over a very large humpback bridge at great speed, but the initial unpleasantness—which was accompanied by grunts from the passengers—gave way to the strange and curiously enjoyable feeling of weightlessness. Many people do the drop for this reason only. I watched as my hair floated languidly in front of my face, and turned to Snell.

‘You okay?’

He nodded.

‘So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?’

‘Fiction Infraction Class II,’ corrected Snell. ‘It’s not as though you did it on purpose. Even though we could argue convincingly that you improved the narrative of Jane Eyre, we still have to prosecute; after all, we can’t have people blundering around in Little Women trying to stop Beth from dying, can we?’

‘Can’t you?’

‘Of course not. Not that people don’t try. When you get before the magistrate, just deny everything and play dumb. I’m trying to get the case postponed on the grounds of strong reader approval.’

‘Will that work?’

‘It worked when Falstaff made his illegal jump to The Merry Wives of Windsor. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV Pt 2. But no, his move was approved—the judge was an opera fan, so maybe that had something to do with it. You haven’t had any operas written about you by Verde or Vaughan Williams, have you?’

‘No’

‘Pity.’

The feeling of weightlessness was odd but it didn’t last long, the increasing deceleration once more gently returning weight to us all. At 40 per cent normal gravity the cabin warning lights went out and we could move around if we wanted.

The technobore on my right started up again.

‘But the real beauty of the Gravitube is its simplicity. Since the force of gravity is the same irrespective of the declination of the tunnel, the trip to Tokyo will take exactly the same time as the trip to New York—and it would be the same again to Carlisle if it didn’t make more sense to use a conventional railway. Mind you,’ he went on, ‘if you could use the wave induction system to keep us accelerating all the way to the surface at the other end, the speed could be well in excess of the seven miles per second needed to achieve escape velocity.’

‘You’ll be telling me that we’ll fly to the moon next,’ I said.

‘We already have,’ returned my neighbour in a conspiratonal whisper. ‘Secret government experiments in space travel have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters have been set up to control our thoughts and actions from repeater stations atop the Empire State Building using interstellar wireless communications from extraterrestrial life forms intent on world domination with the express agreement of the Goliath Corporation and a secret cabal of world leaders known as SPORK.’

‘And don’t tell me,’ I added, ‘Diatrymas are living in the New Forest.’

‘How did you know?’

I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had been extinguished and the airlock pressurised we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.

Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until Passport Control, looked at his watch and announced:

‘Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.’

‘That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?’

Snell coughed politely.

‘The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max DeWinter’s murder charge; no one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.’

He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.

‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Where and when is the hearing?’

‘Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the examining magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at nine twenty-five. Do you speak German?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!’

And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.

I caught the Overmantle to Tokyo a half-hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.