The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [101]
“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.
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