One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [50]
“Why don’t I take it?” I suggested. The odd leaden feeling in me had released a sense of purpose, but of what I was not sure. “You can stay here and have some tea and cookies or something.”
I nodded my head in the direction of the filing cabinet.
“Goodness me, that is so very kind,” replied Lockheed, condemning the lost souls in the unknown book to eternal anonymity with a ridiculously large rubber stamp before handing me the form. “Fourth door on the left.”
“Right you are.”
I opened the door, thanked him again and found the frog-footman waiting for me in the corridor. I told him I had some filing to do, and he led me past the doors marked PIANO DIVISION, ITALICS, and PEBBLES (MISCELLANEOUS) before we got to a door marked RECORDS. The frog-footman told me he’d wait for me there, and I stepped inside.
The room was small and shabby and had a half dozen people waiting to be seen, so I sat on a chair to wait my turn.
“Thursday Next,” I said to the gloomy-looking individual sitting next to me, who was reading a paper and appeared to have a toad actually growing out of the top of his head. The pink skin of his balding pate seemed to merge with the brownygreen of the toad. “The copy,” I added, before he asked. But the man ignored me. The toad growing out of his head, however, was more polite.
“Ah,” said the toad. “A good copy?”
“I do okay.”
“Humph,” said the toad before adding, “Tell me, do I look stupid with a human growing out of my bottom?”
“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